The Google Ads report that shows where your money went

You set a keyword. Google Ads does not show your advert only to people who typed that exact phrase. It shows it to anyone searching something it decides is related, and “related” is a looser word than most people assume when they hand over their card details.

The search terms report is where you find out how loose. It lists the actual words somebody typed, next to the keyword you set that triggered your advert, next to how much each one cost. Read it like a bank statement and most accounts turn up a line that should never have been paid.

Where to find it

Inside a campaign, go to Insights and reports, then Search terms. Sort by cost, highest first, and look at the top twenty.

You are checking one thing: does this search term describe somebody who wants what you sell? Not somebody vaguely interested. Somebody with money and an intention to spend it soon.

A joiner running ads for “fitted wardrobes” might find their budget going on “fitted wardrobe ideas”, “how to build a wardrobe” and “fitted wardrobes Ikea”. None of those three is a customer. One is planning a Pinterest board, one is doing it themselves, one wants a different shop entirely. Each click still costs the same as the one from somebody who typed “fitted wardrobes Leeds quote” and rang within the hour.

Why broad match does this

Keyword match types set how far Google is allowed to wander from what you typed.

Broad match is the default for anyone setting up their first campaign, and it gives Google the most room. Type “fitted wardrobes” as broad match and your advert can show for anything it judges related: wardrobe ideas, wardrobe hinges, a competitor’s brand name, occasionally a search that shares only a theme with what you sell. Google is optimising for clicks and impressions, not for whether the click was a good use of your money.

Phrase match narrows it. “Fitted wardrobes” in phrase match requires that phrase, or something Google considers to mean the same thing, somewhere in the search. Tighter, still not tight.

Exact match is the closest to what people expect a keyword to do, matching the term itself and its obvious variants. Even this is not literal any more: Google has loosened exact match over several years to include what it calls “same meaning” searches, which can still surprise you.

None of the three is wrong on its own. Broad match paired with a well-built negative keyword list can find customers a narrower match type would miss. Broad match with no negative list is the single most common way a small budget disappears, because nothing is stopping Google reaching for the click.

Negative keywords are the other half of the job

A negative keyword tells Google: never show my advert for this term, whatever else matches. It is the tool that makes broad and phrase match safe to use, and it is the thing missing from most accounts that are quietly bleeding budget.

Work down your search terms report and add a negative for every term that is not a buyer:

• Research terms. “Ideas”, “how to”, “DIY”, “guide”, “vs”. Somebody planning is not somebody buying today.
• Job seekers. “Jobs”, “careers”, “salary”, “apprenticeship”. Common on any trade or retail account, and completely wasted spend.
• Wrong products. A search for a product or service you do not offer, adjacent enough that Google thought it counted.
• Competitor names, if you have decided not to bid on them. Some businesses do this deliberately. If you have not decided either way, that is worth a conversation rather than an accident.

Add these at campaign level so they apply everywhere, unless you have a specific reason to allow a term in one campaign and block it in another.

This is not a task you do once. New search terms appear every week as language shifts and Google’s matching changes. A negative list built in January and never revisited is protecting you against last January’s problem.

The check that takes ten minutes a week

Open the search terms report. Sort by cost. Read the top twenty. Add negatives for anything that is not a buyer. Repeat next week.

That routine, done weekly, catches most of the waste before it becomes a pattern. Skipped for three months, the same report often turns up hundreds of pounds spent on searches that were never going to convert, and nobody noticed because the campaign kept generating clicks, and clicks look like progress on a dashboard even when they are not.

What good looks like

A healthy account has a search terms report with few surprises left in it, because the obvious waste has already been trimmed away. The clicks that remain cost more on average, not less, because you have stopped paying for the cheap irrelevant ones and kept the expensive relevant ones. That is the trade you want. Cheap clicks that do not convert are not a bargain.

If nobody has opened this report on your account in months, that is the first thing to check, before touching bids, budgets or anything else. Our Google Ads management starts every account the same way: read what people typed, then decide what to do about it. If you would rather have us look at what is happening on yours, a free website review covers this alongside the site itself.